Stories of Erskine Caldwell by Erskine Caldwell Page B

boiling thickly about her head. Her hair was citrus color, and it strangely matched the darkness of the room and the blackness of her clothes. Its color made her sorrow more uncomfortable, because hers was the head that bowed the deepest in the darkness of the immense room. When I stared at the inky blackness of the walls not within sight, I could somehow see the quickness of her citrus hair tousled on my brother’s chest while he kissed the smoothness of her profile and caressed the softness of her limbs. The beauty and richness of their year of love was yielding, though slowly, to the expanding darkness. It was in the darkness of the hollow room that I was able to believe in the finality of death, and to believe the sorrow I felt in her heart. Lovers for a year cannot believe the finality of death, and she least among them. I wished to tell her all I knew of it, but my words would have told only the triviality. Her love was not to be confused with death, and she would not have wished to understand it.
    It was then to be the beginning of night.
    I could not see her go, but I felt her leave the chair by the window. I walked behind her, touching the unfamiliar furniture, and guiding myself through the room and around it time after time by the direction of the citrus scent of her hair.
    She stopped then, and I realized that I was in the bedroom. I found myself standing in the doorway knowing only one direction, and that was the fragrant citrus scent which came from her hair. When she went from corner to corner, I stood in the doorway of the room waiting for her to speak, for a word to send me away until morning. If there was anything else she wished, or if there was nothing I could do, she had not told me.
    The lonely walk from corner to corner and back again, and the still coldness of her bed, echoed through the hollow room. I could hear her walk across the floor to the bed, touch it with her fingers, and walk back across the carpeted floor to the window. She stood by the window looking out at the nothing of night, the black nothing, while I waited for her to tell me to close the door and go away and leave her alone.
    Though she was in the room, and I was in the doorway, and the rabbits were just outside the window, the emptiness about us descended upon the house like the stillness of night without stars and the moon. When I reached out my arms, they stretched to regions unknown, and when I looked with my eyes, they seemed to be searching for light in all corners of the dark heavens.
    She knew I was waiting in the doorway for a word to send me away, but she was helpless in her loneliness. She knew she could not bear to be alone in the room whose walls could not be seen at such a great distance. She knew her loneliness could not be dispelled with a word uttered in the hollow darkness, and she knew herself alone could not be propelled from the immensity of the house.
    My brother had written to me of her with a feeling of regret because I did not have someone like her to love. He had been with her a year, sharing this house and sharing this bed. Each night they had gone side by side into this room where she was now but for me alone. Then it was that I could feel the loneliness of this night, because he had been taken away from her; while I, who had never known such love, was never to be made a part of it.
    Once more she went to the bed and touched it. The room was dark and the bed was still. She knew now that she was to be alone.
    She began to cry softly, as a girl cries.
    Her slippers dropped from her feet, and the echo was like the throwing of a man’s solid-heeled shoes against the floor.
    When she touched a comb on the table and it fell to the floor in the darkness, it might have been a man’s clumsy hands feeling in the night and knocking clocks and mirrors from their places.
    Her knees touched a chair, but the sound was like a man walking blindly in a dark room, stumbling over furniture and cursing hoarsely under his